More on John Kerry and cohorts from Winter Soldier and Dewey Canyon III. Quotes from wintersoldier.com and ‘Stolen Valor’ B. G. Burkett and Glenna Whitley, Verity Press, 1998, Chapter 6, Atrocities In April 1971, the Vietnam Veterans Against the War (VVAW) staged a demonstration it called Dewey Canyon III, a “limited incursion into the country of Congress.”
The protest was named after an operation in 1969 that sent elements of the 3rd Marine Division into Laos. About this same time, an ad appeared in The New York Times signed by forty-nine American servicemen from the 1st Air Cavalry Division urging support for antiwar demonstrations. But as United Press International later reported, the men, members of a Mekong Delta-based helicopter unit, had neither read nor paid for the ad. After being blocked from holding a ceremony honoring the war dead at Arlington National Cemetery, the veterans marched to the Capitol to present sixteen demands to Congress. At the end of the day; they held a candlelight march around the White House.
After a man who said his son died in Vietnam blew taps, the soldiers began flinging their war medals over a high wire fence in front of the Capitol: Purple Hearts, Bronze Star Medals, Silver Stars — bits of ribbon and metal hurled in the face of the government that had so betrayed them. Some, after throwing away what had cost them so dearly, broke down and cried. One of them was John Kerry, Vietnam Navy veteran and aspiring politician who had been among those who organized the protest. Kerry flung a handful of medals — he had received the Silver Star, a Bronze Star Medal, and three Purple Hearts — over the fence. Kerry spoke later that week before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, putting a face on the antiwar movement far different from the one seen before — the scruffy hippie or wild-eyed activist. Kerry represented the All-American boy, mentally twisted by being asked to do terrible things, then abandoned by his government. From start to finish, the public took Dewey Canyon III at face value, not understanding that they were watching brilliant political theater.
Kerry, a Kennedy protege with white-hot political aspirations, ascended center stage as both a war hero and as an antiwar hero throwing away his combat decorations. His speech, apparently off the cuff, was eloquent, impassioned. But years later, after his election to the Senate, Kerry’s medals turned up on the wall of his Capitol Hill office. When a reporter noticed them, Kerry admitted that the medals he had thrown that day were not his. And Kerry’s emotional, from-the-heart speech had been carefully crafted by a speechwriter for Robert Kennedy named Adam Walinsky, who also tutored him on how to present it.
TV reporters totally ignored another Vietnam veteran, Melville L. Stephens, a former aide to Adm. Elmo Zumwalt, chief of Naval Operations, who that same day urged the Senate not to abandon America’s allies in South Vietnam. “Peace for us must not come at the cost of their lives,” Stephens said in a speech he wrote himself.
Others supposedly Vietnam Vets were with Kerry during this peace march. Alfred H. Hubbard entered the Air Force in October 1952…..There is no record of any service in Vietnam …Michael Harbert, also had problems with their credibility…His only overseas service was in Taiwan from November 28, 1967, to April 9, 1968.
Veteran Chuck Onan, for example, claimed he had attended parachute, frogman, and jungle survival schools and had received special training in torture techniques, such as stripping women prisoners, spreading their legs, and driving pointed sticks into their vaginas. Onan became a member of an LRRP (Long Range Recon Patrol) unit but deserted before he was sent to Vietnam, fleeing to Sweden so he did not have to kill. “They just went too far,” Onan said. He (actually) worked as a stock room clerk at a Marine base in Beaufort, S.C Lawyer and activist Mark Lane was one of the organizers of Winter Soldier.
Lane quoted one man’s contention that a female Communist sympathizer was interrogated, tortured, and then raped by every soldier in his battalion. “Lane does not explain that in Vietnam an American battalion runs anywhere from one thousand to twelve hundred men.” I can remember seeing the TV shots of these people marching and thinking ‘what a mob of hippy freaks.’ How could they have been soldiers? Lie after lie – just like the anti-war mob here in Australia. Keep telling lies and fools will believe. Considering Kerry for President is the same as putting Jim Cairns forward for PM. Info on Kerry is coming thick and fast and people are starting to notice. Read more>>
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